Common Decency
by FrozenPaladin
Summary: A broken creature in the wreakage of the world tries to make himself presentable to a strange visitor.


**AN: This is a main-universe drabble independent of CiFtC.**

"Betty? Who's Betty?"

He runs his fingers across a photo marked with the name, uttering the thought aloud. Something in his head verges on recognition, but the crown banishes it easily. Instead, it leads the broken man into the same bramble of thoughts he struggles with every day- the thoughts of his princess, whoever and wherever she is. The woman in the picture is dismissed. She is beautiful, yes, but she couldn't be his princess; he would remember her if she was.

Without much physical sign of warning, he drops to his knees, his face in his hands, crying.

The days have been passing by without significance, but Simon has lost the pressing urgency to act that most humans are at least somewhat compelled by. Fallen into a state of inaction, he wanders around a very limited area of the snow-covered ruins, oftentimes refusing to even leave the cave he's fashioned for himself. It's in the highest pile of ice and snow, where no one will bother him or seek him out to do him harm. He's even started to make a little home of it, bringing back scavenged treasures from his rare escapades. He likes the strange objects he unearths from beneath the ice and snow. They're strange and useful and they don't try to hurt him. Sometimes the things he finds are nice to look at, too. Like the picture of the pretty lady named Betty. She's probably dead, he figures. Everyone is dead.

Curled up tight in his own little space, he frequently neglects to eat. Not that it really matters anymore. Besides, eating only ever results in unpleasant things anymore. More often than not, when he finds food, he shoves as much as he can down his gullet, and proceeds to vomit shortly afterwards. But on occasion, he is clever, and he eats a large quantity over a longer duration. This action, ironically, produces a more graphic result; unable to digest the incoming quantities of food but too far along in the process to regurgitate the current contents, the oddly inelastic organs are forced to accept the incoming contents, and sometimes, enough pressure and content builds up in the intestines that the thinning walls of the organs burst, spilling half-digested mush into the abdominopelvic cavity. He doesn't understand the nature of this, of course, and he delights when his attempts to reach a healthier weight seem to succeed. Dismissing the pain in his middle as simply more of the usual torments, he goes for weeks with distended, bloated organs and irritated cavity lining, before the magic in his system finally manages to purge his body of the contaminants.

Mere rags hang around his emaciated frame. They're the sun-bleached, chemical-bleached, weather-worn remains of what used to be his fine suit and vest. He lost the bow tie long ago… really, he had fashioned it into a makeshift hair ribbon for Marceline, but considering how he can't remember Marceline all that well at the moment, the bow tie is as good as lost to him right now. His glasses, too, have been discarded, although he's still technically got them, tucked away in a little box amidst all the junk he's accrued, echoes of sentiment refusing to let him discard the broken, lens-less frames.

Actually, he's been meaning to do something about the rags. They're not doing very well as clothes, after all. The pants are full of holes and worn through from the constant rubbing of walking along. But he figures that he ought to wear something more intact. After all, he has a picture of a lady. He should be decent in front of her. Or as decent as he can be.

He turns the picture over so that the lady named Betty can't see him for now, and he goes to work. He half-removes, half-peels the ragged bits of cloth from himself, and tries to make sense of how he might go about fashioning them into patchwork clothing. But there isn't much to work with. No matter how he tries to go about it, he can't come up with a "pants" shape with the cloth that he has. After several hours of irritation, getting distracted, and more irritation, he figures that the lady in the picture is probably getting bored of not being able to see anything. He has to come up with an idea, quickly.

With some scavenged needle and threads coaxed from the rags themselves, he begins to work, sewing stitch after stitch into the ends of the strips he tears from the rags, until he has one long length of second-hand cloth. This he weaves around his legs and nethers, occasionally stopping to tie a knot here or there, to keep his improvised creation in place. Eventually, he manages to produce something along the line of what looks like a mummified diaper.

Once he ensures that the hodgepodge of cloth isn't going to slip down (unlikely, considering how the top is looped over the protruding ilia at his sides), he goes back over to the picture, and sits it upright again. He smiles at the lady, and the lady in the picture smiles back. At least he has someone left who likes him.

If she were still alive, she'd probably be proud of him for doing so well!


End file.
